October 15, 2013, by Emma Thorne

Happy 80th birthday, Sir Peter!

In 1933, construction work began on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US  President Franklin D Roosevelt took office and attempted to steer the country through the Great Depression, cinema audiences flocked to see Faye Wray in the classic movie King Kong and Germany’s Adolf Hitler began his inexorable rise to power.

And, in the London borough of Lambeth, a baby was born who was destined to go on to develop a technology that would transform diagnostic medicine and save the lives of thousands of people.

The 9^th of October this year marked the 80^th birthday of Sir Peter Mansfield, the Nottingham scientist whose pioneering research led to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and earned him a Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.

To mark the occasion family, friends and colleagues gathered together recently for a celebratory dinner held in Sir Peter’s honour at the Walled Garden at Beeston Fields Golf Course.

Among those in attendance to offer Sir Peter their best wishes were eminent surgeon Professor Donald Longmore, who was among the team which performed the UK’s first heart transplant operation in 1968, and engineer Sir Martin Wood, co-founder of Oxford Instruments, which designed and manufactured the superconducting magnets used in the early MRI scanners.

Sir Peter, who was knighted in 1993 and received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Pride of Britain Awards in 2009, published his biography The Long Road to Stockholm earlier this year, a frank and personal account of the trials and tribulations of pushing the boundaries of scientific research to the limit.

Happy birthday Sir Peter and very best wishes from all at The Univerity of Nottingham.

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